Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Charles Bukowski

October's scrounging around in used book dens for Beat arcana uncovered Barry Miles' biography of this laureate of low life. It has been holding my interest. Bukowski, though not an associate of the Beat writers, is beat in the sense of beaten down and disaffected but not in Kerouac's sense of beatific. A worthless fellow, a drunkard, a lecher, a misogynist, a shameless user and betrayer of his benefactors, Bukowski (1920-1994) is nonetheless a pretty good scribbler of poetry and prose. (I call him a worthless fellow, but child is father to the man, and Bukowski had a terrible childhood.) If I need an excuse to poke into the particulars of his paltry life, there is my masthead motto, "Study everything, join nothing," and the Terentian homo sum, nihil humani, etc. The other night I read about him in bed, a mistake, since the night mind should be primed for its nocturnal preconscious ruminations with ennobling rather than debasing images. In compensation I read Simone Weil in the predawn hours of the next day. A comparison of the two would be an interesting exercise.

The Dean of Dissipation versus the Red Virgin. A celebration of the base, sordid, cheap, tawdry, depraved, degraded, of the complete abdication of the spirit to the flesh and its lusts, versus an anorexic asceticism bordering on nihilism.

How wild the diversity of human types! How impossible to be bored in a world so populated. How should we live? There is no substitute for finding your own path.